VEO's vision is to establish a versatile emerging infectious diseases forecasting, nowcasting, and tracking system that serves as an interactive virtual observatory for the generation and distribution of high-quality actionable information for evidence-based early warning, risk assessment and monitoring of emerging infectious disease (EID) threats by public health actors and researchers in the One Health domain.
VEO's Objectives
OBJECTIVE 1 – TO DEVELOP AND OPERATE THE VEO DATA PLATFORM
The VEO data platform will support rapid mining, sharing, integration, presentation and analysis of traditional and novel ‘bio data’ with a choice of “contextual data”, integrating publicly available and confidential data.
OBJECTIVE 2 – DEVELOP INNOVATIVE CLOUD-BASED COLLABORATIVE DATA-MINING TOOLS
VEO will develop novel cloud-based data-mining tools and services, supporting data-intensive interdisciplinary collaboration of geographically distributed international teams, and integrate these into the VEO system (the VEO analytical platform).
OBJECTIVE 3 - TO DEVELOP NOVEL PHENOTYPING TOOLS AND WORKFLOWS AND INTEGRATE THESE INTO THE VEO SYSTEM
VEO will develop tools to generate, update, expand and validate inventories of genetic signatures associated with relevant (i.e. actionable) pathogen traits, to guide risk assessments.
OBJECTIVE 4 – DEVELOP NOVEL HOST EXPOSURE ASSESSMENT TOOLS AND WORKFLOWS AND INTEGRATE THESE INTO THE VEO SYSTEM
VEO will integrate serological data produced by novel antibody profiling technologies into the VEO system and in early warning, risk assessment and monitoring of EID threats. Technologies developed will encompass 1) peptide arrays covering the main target antigens of viruses addressed in the use-case scenarios for testing reservoir- and disease hosts; 2) Analytical tools for exploration, analysis and visualisation of multianalyte array data combined with metadata; and 3) Mathematical models for estimating exposure from multi-analyte antibody profiles.
OBJECTIVE 5 - TEST AND EVALUATE THE VEO SYSTEM IN FIVE USE-CASE SCENARIOS AND DEFINE KEY USER REQUIREMENTS FOR VEO FUNCTIONALITIES
The novel technologies and functionalities of the VEO system are (co)designed, tested and evaluated in five complementary use-case scenarios, with the overall purpose of ensuring that the VEO system is optimally attuned to the needs of its intended users, and obtaining proof-of-principle of the technologies and tools developed.
OBJECTIVE 6 – DEVELOP A COMMON UNDERSTANDING OF KEY DATA-MINING NEEDS, OPTIONS, CHALLENGES, AND SOLUTIONS
OBJECTIVE 7 – DEVELOP AN INVENTORY, ANALYSIS AND GUIDELINE(S) FOR THE ETHICAL, LEGAL AND SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS (THE ELSI OBJECTIVE) OF INTEGRATING NOVEL TYPES OF DATA INTO THE VEO CORE DATA HUBS
Objective 7 covers (i) ethical and legal constraints of merging societal big-data collections and epidemiological data, and (ii) ethical and legal implications of citizen-science aided public health research.
OBJECTIVE 8 - PROVIDE A SUITE OF ANALYTICAL TOOLS, STORAGE, AND DATA SHARING WORKSPACE TO FACILITATE THE SHARING, ANALYSIS AND REAUSE OF RAW AND ANNOTATED SARS-COV-2 GENOMIC DATA.
OBJECTIVE 9 - TO PROVIDE AND OVERVIEW OF SARS-COV-2 SEQUENCE VARIANTS OF CONCERN FOR EPIDEMIOLGOY AND IMMUNOLGY, AS WELL AS INFORMATION OF THE IMPORTANCE OF MINORITY AND MAJORITY VARIANTS FOR THE PANDEMIC.